Buggy flash videos

[TheGreatSatan]

Whenever I try watching a video on a site (Yes, porn too) it's always buggy. Even if I let the loading bar go all the way across. The audio is fine, but the video plays like a photo slideshow. Youtube and Hulu play fine, and Adobe says I have the latest flash player available.

What else could it be?

[Konrad]

Close all explorer and browser windows.

Uninstall all your Adobe stuff (Flash, Shockwave, Acrobat) from control panel.

Restart Windows. Recommended in 9x/XP/2K. Necessary in Vista/7 to avoid problems caused by having "insufficient" admin privileges to rewrite files still owned by not-quite-finished-uninstalling software.
Manually delete any Adobe stuff in \Programs, \Shared, \Common, etc.

Download and install latest Adobe stuff.

Maybe you don't have to wipe all your Adobe stuff, but this way you can be certain that all corrupt resources, dll version conflicts, bad registry, etc are all fixed to Adobe defaults. Maybe a real hassle if you have a lot of Flash or Acrobat developer stuff installed.

I'll use this opportunity to mention PDF Speedup, I can't live without it.

[Edit]

Uh, I assume this problem isn't just caused by one bad website?

[Luke122]

With Flash 10, you can right click on the video playback window, and make sure that hardware acceleration is enabled.

Also, dumping your temp directory and internet temp files might help, as could a defrag.

[Drum Thumper]

Also, dumping your temp directory and internet temp files might help, as could a defrag.

+1 to this. I saw this on a client's computer once, so I ran Ccleaner and defragged it, and also blew all the dust out of the machine. Ran like a champ afterwards.